May book bag: from a monograph for an underrated Pop artist to a book about Derek Jarman’s Blue movie

Joe Tilson, Marco Livingstone, Lund Humphries, 224pp, £45 (hb)

Joe Tilson trained as a carpenter aged 14, before attending art school in London with Frank Auerbach, David Hockney and Peter Blake, becoming an integral but underrated part of the post-war British Pop art generation. “Still working, and still evolving, he has continued to explore many new directions and a great variety of mediums since moving away from his Pop origins,” says a publisher’s statement. Chapters broken down by decade include The 1980s: Unity And Wholeness and The 1990s: Le Crete Senesi And Conjunctions. The monograph accompanies an exhibition of Tilson’s work at two London galleries: Marlborough (Modest Materials & A-Z Box of Friends and Family, until 3 June) and Cristea Roberts (Joe Tilson: Breaking the Rules, until 17 June).

Sorolla: A Vision of Spain, Cristina Carrillo de Albornoz, Assouline, 272pp, £85 (hb)

This survey of the late 19th-century artist Joaquín Sorolla, dubbed the “Spanish master of light”, highlights his tender family portraits and huge beach pictures made in the open air, replete with sand specks caught in the paint. “No one, not even Sorolla’s detractors has failed to recognise the two essential characteristics of the painter’s work: his mastery of technique and his ability to replicate sunlight,” writes Blanca Pons-Sorolla, the artist’s great-grandaughter, in the foreword. Numerous behind-the-scenes images show the painter at work, while the 14-painting series Vision of Spain, which was painted by Sorolla at various locations in Spain between 1912 and 1919, “aimed to retrieve the beauty behind traditional Spanish culture before it vanished”, says the author.

Blue (ekphrasis series), Derek Jarman, David Zwirner Books, 64pp, £10.95 (pb)

The influential film Blue—which shows only an unchanging blue screen—was film-maker Derek Jarman’s final feature before he died in 1994. “The voiceover, written by Jarman, consists of a diaristic and poetic text documenting his Aids-related illness and impending death at a time that he had become partially blind, his vision often interrupted by blue light,” writes the former Tate curator, Andrew Wilson. The film script is reproduced in this volume to mark Blue’s 30th anniversary. “The abstraction of the work is not absolute, in the sense that the dense soundtrack is strongly concrete, featuring music, noises, whispers, voices speaking poetry or conversational sounding prose… a washing machine whirring and a refrigerator defrosting,” writes Michael Charlesworth in the introduction.

Making Their Mark: Art by Women in the Shah Garg Collection, Mark Godfrey and Katy Siegel (eds), Gregory R. Miller & Co., 432pp, $60 (hb)

Making Their Mark lifts the lid on the collection of the California-based collector Komal Shah and her husband Gaurav Garg, which focuses on Modern and contemporary women artists. “Women, like many other marginalised groups, want to be seen as artists first, with their work transcending identity-related labels,” says Shah in a statement. “It is well-known that gender inequities remain in the study, presentation, and acquisition of works of art,” she adds. The book covers topics including the development of abstraction, the role and importance of craft traditions and artistic experimentations with new technologies. Artists featured include Jennifer Bartlett, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Trude Guermonprez, Jacqueline Humphries and Suzanne Jackson. The book is published under the auspices of the new Shah Garg foundation.

Samuel Ross, White Cube, 138pp, £110 (pb)

The fashion designer, furniture maker and artist Samuel Ross is making a splash at White Cube Bermondsey in London (until 14 May), presenting a “series of abstract works which use imagery of collapsed landscapes and supine bodies to explore the subject of Black experience,” according to a gallery statement. The accompanying book shines a light on Ross’s eclectic body of work, from the large-scale canvases 9 Hours and 7 Hours (both 2022) to his geometric sculptures inspired by the 1960s New Generation Sculpture group. Ross is known for his menswear fashion label A-COLD-WALL*, the industrial design studio SR_A and his work with the late US fashion designer Virgil Abloh.